2016 Voyager – Istanbul [TR]

The Voyager 1 space probe is the human-made object furthest away from Earth. Launched by NASA in 1977, [Voyager 1 and] 2, were designed to become humanity’s potential ambassadors to extraterrestrial forms of intelligent life. Each of the probes bears on its backside a copy of the Voyager Golden Record: an audio-visual introduction to ‘Life on Earth’ encoded as a phonographic signal. The most human thing, perhaps, about sending Voyager’s interstellar ‘in a bottle’ is not the anticipation of an answer, but the comforting thought that the message is somewhere out there. The Voyagers already constitute two archaeological remnants of our species from 1977… As their sensing instruments fall into sleep one by one, they are destined to become two inert cenotaphs to our species. –RH, EK

Voyager — Humanity in Interstellar Space is a reflection on the Voyager Golden Record, a collection of 116 images, sounds and music selected by NASA in 1977 to explain human civilization to alien species. Two copies of the record travel in deep space on board the space probes Voyager 1 and 2. Two digital counters display the distance of the probes from earth in real time while an oversized circular projection presents excerpts from the Record.